Why are increased sentences and the severe punishment of those convicted of crimes so popular
and prevalent in U.S. culture? Since the late 1970s our society has accepted increasingly rigid
and vengeful ways of punishing those convicted of crimes. Behind this trend is the momentum of
250 years of a strain of religious philosophies brought to our shores by Pilgrims, Puritans, and
other colonial settlers influenced by a Protestant theology called Calvinism. Today, many ideas,
concepts, and frames of reference in modern American society are legacies of the history of
Protestantism as it divided and morphed through Calvinism, revivalist evangelicalism, and fundamentalism.
Even people who see themselves as secular and not religious often unconsciously
adopt many of these historic cultural legacies while thinking of their ideas as simply common
sense.

What is "common sense" for one group, however, is foolish belief for another. According to
author George Lakoff, a linguist who studies the linkage between rhetoric and ideas, there is a
tremendous gulf between what conservatives and liberals think of as common sense, especially
when it comes to issues of moral values. In his recent book Moral Politics, which has gained
attention in both media and public debates, Lakoff argues that conservatives base their moral
views of social policy on a "Strict Father" model, while liberals base their views on a
"Nurturant Parent" model.11

Other scholars have looked at these issues and
found similar patterns. According to Axel R. Schaefer, there are three main ideological tendencies
in U.S. social reform:

Liberal/Progressive: based on changing systems and institutions to change
individual behavior on a collective basis over time.

Calvinist/Free Market: based on
changing individual social behavior through punishment.

Evangelical/Revivalist: based on born again conversion to change individual
behavior, but still linked to some Calvinist ideas of punishment.12

Coalition Politics

Republicans have forged a broad coalition of
two of the three tendencies that involves moderately conservative Protestants who nonetheless
hold some traditional Calvinist ideas; Free Market advocates ranging from multinational executives
to economic conservatives to libertarian ideologues; and conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists
with a core mission of converting people to their particular brand of Christianity.
This is a coalition with many fracture points and disagreements.

As the Bush Administration has shifted government social welfare toward "Faith-based" programs,
it has diverted government funding into privatized religious organizations (which raises
serious separation of Church and State issues), but the amount of funding applied to "Faithbased"
projects is small compared to the large budget cuts in previously government-funded
government-run social welfare programs. Libertarians approve of the overall budget cuts, but
would prefer cutting out the government funding of "Faith Based" projects.

Not all evangelicals and fundamentalists are political conservatives, although most are. The
Christian Right is that group of politically conservative Christians-primarily evangelicals and
fundamentalists-who have been mobilized into a social movement around social issues and
traditional moral values; and who have sought political power through elections and legislation.
The Christian Right became a political force in the Republican Party in the 1980s as part of a
strategy of right-wing political strategists to enlist evangelical and fundamentalist leaders, especially
television evangelists, in building a voter base.

The Christian Right has used populist rhetoric
to build a mass base for elitist conservative politics.13 This process leads many people
to vote against their economic self-interest, as Thomas Frank observes in his book
What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.14
Today, the Christian Right is the single largest organized voting block in the
Republican Party. These are predominantly White evangelical voters. Most Black
Christian evangelicals overwhelmingly vote Democratic. The voting power of White
Christian evangelicals has meant they are now political players on the national scene.
For example President George W. Bush's first term selection as Attorney General of
the United States of John Ashcroft, a hero to the Christian Right and himself a member of the
ultra-conservative evangelical denomination Assemblies of God, was a political reward to White
evangelical voters.

Some of the goals of many White evangelical conservatives are shared by another group of people
who call themselves the Neoconservatives. These are former liberals and leftists who rejected
the social, cultural, and political liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Neoconservative
social and cultural politics echo many Calvinist themes such as the need to defend traditional
morality and the patriarchal family; the special role for America in world affairs, and the righteousness
of economic capitalism.

As the New Right gained power, Republicans-and Democrats-began to support repressive and
punitive criminal justice policies that were shaped by one of the historic legacies of Calvinism:
the idea that people arrested for breaking laws require punishment, shame, and discipline.

While most mainline Protestant denominations and evangelical churches have jettisoned some of
the core tenets of Calvinism, ideas about punishment and retribution brought to our shores by
early Calvinist settlers are so rooted in the American cultural experience and social traditions
that many people ranging from religious to secular view them as simply "common sense." What
Lakoff calls the "Strict Father" model gains its power among conservatives because it dovetails
with their ideas of what is a common sense approach to morality, public policy, and crime. To
understand where this "common sense" comes from, and why it is tied to the Strict Father
model, requires that we trace the influence of Protestant Calvinism.

The Roots of Calvinism

Martin Luther founded Protestantism in a schism with the Catholic Church in 1517, but it was
John Calvin who literally put it on the map in the city of Geneva, which is now in Switzerland.
In the mid 1500s, Calvin forged a theocracy-a society where only the leaders of a specific religion
can be the leaders of the secular government.

Calvinists believed that Adam and Eve disobeyed God and tasted the apple from the tree of
knowledge at the urging of an evil demon. As a result of this "original sin," the betrayal of
God's command, all humans are born in sin. God must punish us for our sins; we must be
ashamed of our wrongdoing; and we require the harsh yet loving discipline of our heavenly
father to correct our failures.

Calvinists also believe that "God's divine
providence [has] selected, elected, and predestined certain people to restore humanity
and reconcile it with its Creator."15 These "Elect" were originally thought to be the
only people going to Heaven. To the Calvinists, material success and wealth was
a sign that you were one of the Elect, and thus were favored by God. Who better to
shepherd a society populated by God's wayward children? The poor, the weak, the
infirm? God was punishing them for their sins. This theology was spreading at a time
when the rise of industrial capitalism tore the fabric of European society, shifting the
nature of work and the patterns of family life of large numbers of people. There were
large numbers of angry, alienated people who the new elites needed to keep in line
to avoid labor unrest and to protect production and profits.

Max Weber, an early sociologist who saw culture as a powerful force that shaped
both individuals and society, argued that Calvinism grew in a symbiotic relationship with the rise
of industrial capitalism.16 As Sara Diamond explains:

Calvinism arose in Europe centuries ago in part as a reaction to Roman
Catholicism's heavy emphasis on priestly authority and on salvation through acts
of penance. One of the classic works of sociology, Max Weber's Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism, links the rise of Calvinism to the needs of budding
capitalists to judge their own economic success as a sign of their preordained
salvation. The rising popularity of Calvinism coincided with the consolidation of
the capitalist economic system. Calvinists justified their accumulation of wealth,
even at the expense of others, on the grounds that they were somehow destined to
prosper. It is no surprise that such notions still find resonance within the Christian
Right which champions capitalism and all its attendant inequalities.17

Awakening To Evangelicalism

From the 1730s through the 1770s there was a Protestant revival movement in the colonies
dubbed the First Great Awakening. As the revival swept the colonies, many reported a highly
emotional experience of conversion after hearing sermons at large public meetings. The new
evangelists tended to be zealous, judgmental, and authoritarian. Not everyone was happy with
the results of the First Great Awakening, and some rejected the trend and remained on the traditional
orthodox Calvinist path. Others rejected both and developed what became Unitarianism
as a response. By the early 1800s there were three tendencies in American Protestantism:

1) Orthodoxy in the form of northern Calvinist Congregationalists and southern Anglicans;

2) Revivalist rationalism and evangelism that drew not only from the
Congregationalists and Anglicans (later called Episcopalians), but also swept
through the smaller Protestant denominations such as the Baptists, Methodists,
and Presbyterians;

3) Unitarianism, still relatively small but influential in the northeast.18

Social Reformers: Quakers and Unitarians

Many ideas on social reform that are now supported by mainline Protestant denominations were
initially promoted by religious dissidents such as the Quakers and later the Unitarians.

Quakers had been concerned with prison conditions since the late 1600s in both England and in
colonial Pennsylvania, and they introduced the idea of prison as a means for reform rather than
punishment.19 They also promoted the "conception of the criminal as at least partially a victim
of conditions created by society" which implied that society had some obligation to reforming
the criminal.20 In the early 1800s Quaker activist Elizabeth Gurney Fry launched a major prison
reform movement in England, and these ideas were carried to the United States.

The Unitarians rejected the Calvinist idea that
man was born in sin and argued that sometimes people did bad things because they were
trapped in poverty or lacked the education required to move up in society. The Unitarians
took the idea of transforming society and changing personal behavior popularized by
the First Great Awakening and shifted it into a plan for weaving a social safety net under
the auspices of the secular government.

The attention to social conditions by the
Unitarians and Quakers overlapped with the Second Great Awakening, which ran from the 1790s to the 1840s. Sin was seen as tied to selfishness. Good Christians should strive to behave in a way that benefited the public good. America was seen as a Christian Nation that would fulfill Biblical prophecy. By the late
1800s, most major Protestant denominations (called "Mainline" denominations) had found some accommodation with the discoveries of
science and secular civic arrangements such as separation of Church and State favored by
Enlightenment values.21 There was also "a growing interest by churches in social service, often
called the Social Gospel, [which] undercut evangelicalism's traditional emphasis on personal
salvation."22

Fundamentals and Prophecies

All of this created a backlash movement. A group of conservative ministers condemned this shift
and urged Protestants to return to what they saw as the fundamentals of orthodox Protestant
belief. From 1910 to 1915 these reactionary theologians published articles on what they saw as
the fundamentals of Christianity. Thus they became known as the fundamentalists. Among
their beliefs was the idea that the Bible was never in error and was to be read literally, not as
metaphor. While rejecting Calvinist ideas of predestination and the Elect, fundamentalists sought
to restore many orthodox Calvinist tenets-and they embraced the idea that man was born in
sin and thus needed punishment, shame, and discipline to correct sinful tendencies.

Although fundamentalists and evangelicals tended to withdraw from the political fray, devoting
most of their energy to saving souls, they challenged modern ideas using such modern tools as
radio and later television to communicate their message. Both groups were largely suspicious of
the social reforms implemented during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. Government
welfare programs could be pictured as similar to the collectivism of Godless and perhaps Satanic
Soviet communism.

The result of all this turmoil in evangelical and fundamentalist communities was the development
of a tendency called "dominionism" based on the concept that Christians need to take dominion
over the earth. Dominionism is an umbrella term that covers politically-active Christians from a
variety of theological and institutional traditions.

While this was happening, in May of 1979 a group of conservative political activists met with
conservative religious leaders to plan a way to mobilize evangelicals into becoming conservative
voters for Republican candidates. Attendees included Jerry Falwell, Richard Viguerie, Paul
Weyrich, Howard Phillips, Ed McAteer, and Robert Billings. This is where Jerry Falwell was
tasked with creating the Moral Majority organization, which became a key component of the
New Right. The Moral majority focused on opposing abortion and pornography. After evangelicals
helped elect Ronald Reagan president, he appointed C. Everett Koop to the position of
surgeon general of the United States as a payback.

The New Right not only recruited evangelicals
and fundamentalists into their coalition, but also sought to strengthen the bridge between traditional
moral values Calvinists and the neoliberal laissezfaire "Free Market" advocates in the Republican
Party; which included both anti-tax economic conservatives and anti-government libertarians. This
was a coalition initially forged by conservatives in the 1950s.23

Many conservative Christians did not necessarily
oppose a role for government, or object to government funding, as long as it focused on individual
behavior. Thus faith-based initiatives are seen as a proper place for government funding because they
shift tax dollars away from social change toward individual change.

The Child, the Family, the Nation, and God

Since the 1980s and the rise of the Christian Right, public policy regarding the treatment of
criminals has echoed the patriarchal and punitive child-rearing practices favored by many
Protestant fundamentalists. Most readers will recognize the phrase: "Spare the rod and spoil the
child." This idea comes from a particular authoritarian version of fundamentalist belief.

According to Philip Greven:

The authoritarian Christian family is dependent on coercion and pain to obtain
obedience to authority within and beyond the family, in the church, the community,
and the polity. Modern forms of Christian fundamentalism share the same obsessions
with obedience to authority characteristic of earlier modes of evangelical
Protestantism, and the same authoritarian streak evident among seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Anglo-American evangelicals is discernible today, for precisely
the same reasons: the coercion of children through painful punishments in order
to teach obedience to divine and parental authority.24

The belief in the awful and eternal punishment of
a literal Hell justifies the punishment, shame, and discipline of children by parents who want their
offspring to escape a far worse fate. This includes physical or "corporal" forms of punishment.
"Many advocates of corporal punishment are convinced that such punishment and pain are
necessary to prevent the ultimate destruction and damnation of their children's souls."25 This is
often accompanied by the idea that a firm male hand rightfully dominates the family and the society. 26 The system of authoritarian and patriarchal
control used in some families is easily transposed into a framework for conservative public policy,
especially in the criminal justice system.

Lakoff explains that on a societal level, according
to conservative "Strict Father morality, harsh prison terms for criminals and life imprisonment
for repeat offenders are the only moral options." The arguments by conservatives are "moral arguments,
not practical arguments. Statistics about which policies do or do not actually reduce crime
rates do not count in a morally-based discourse." These "traditional moral values" conservatives
tend not to use explanations based on the concepts of class and social causes, nor do they recommend
policy based on those notions."27 According to Lakoff:

For liberals the essence of America is nurturance, part of which is helping those
who need help. People who are "trapped" by social and economic forces need
help to "escape." The metaphorical Nurturant Parent-the government-has a
duty to help change the social and economic system that traps people. By this
logic, the problem is in the society, not in the people innocently "trapped." If
social and economic forces are responsible, then other social and economic forces
must be brought to bear to break the "trap."

This whole picture is simply inconsistent with Strict Father morality and the conservative
worldview it defines. In that worldview, the class hierarchy is simply a
ladder, there to be climbed by anybody with the talent and self-discipline to climb
it. Whether or not you climb the ladder of wealth and privilege is only a matter of
whether you have the moral strength, character, and inherent talent to do so.28

To conservatives, the liberal arguments about class and impoverishment, and institutionalized
social forces such as racism and sexism, are irrelevant. They appear to be "excuses for lack of
talent, laziness, or some other form of moral weakness."29 Much of this worldview traces to the
lingering backbeat of Calvinist theology that infuses "common sense" for many conservatives.

Conclusion

The conservative Calvinist/Free Market coalition works the front end of the criminal justice system,
ensuring harsh sentencing and incarceration. The evangelical/revivalist groups agree with
that aspect of Calvinism, but they also work the back end of the system, salvaging the souls of
the incarcerated so that whether or not they leave prison, they will be born again as properly
behaved citizens heading to Heaven. There are only a relative handful of evangelicals (conservative
and progressive) who challenge the system of increasingly harsh sentencing.

Defending Justice is a publication of
Political Research Associates (PRA), an independent nonprofit research
center that exposes the Right and larger oppressive movements and institutions.
PRA produces research and analytic tools to inform and support progressive
activism.